While Blender has been great for me since I first installed it, today it began to look like someone had sliced the screen into tons of pieces that just slide down towards the right. If it matters, my computer is really old: Pentium 4 HT, ATI Radeon 9800, Windows XP, etc. If I have to upgrade to a better computer, I’m giving up on Blender entirely.
The sliced screen sounds like your graphics card memory or the capcitator supplying power for the memory on the card is broken. That was a common problem with the R9800.
Does it only happen in Blender or in other 3D apllications/games as well?
It appears that it only affects Blender. I did install Catalyst to see if that would help, but it does nothing. If there’s no way to fix my PC outside of getting a repair I can’t afford right now, then I guess I can’t use it. On the other hand, if there’s a software way to fix it, then I’d love to know.
Pardon me for double posting, but numerous other 3D modeling programs since this post work fine. However, I still want to give Blender a try, due to its more widespread documentation and tutorials. Should I see if disabling hardware acceleration would help, or is it not going to do anything?
If your other 3D applications are working fine, there’s then no problem with your card, or all of them would run into various visual problems.
If you are trying the latest version available ( Blender 2.62 ) when observing this problem, maybe you should give a try to Blender 2.49b :
http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.49b/
That had a different interface and being older may possibly work better with your computer if the latest version gives you problem.
That works, thanks. Should I make a bug report, or would nobody pay attention? In the meantime, I’ll track down some Blender 2.4 tutorials…
Before filling a bug, try to download a version of Blender that correspond to your OS here :
http://builder.blender.org/download/
They’re the most up to date in regard to development, more advanced in term of bug fixing and functions than the now old “stable” release of Blender 2.62.
If your problem continue to occurs in these version, it may be usefull to report this (with screenshots too).
For Blender 2.49b , the manual is complete (unlike the 2.6x manual that is incompleted) and downloadable in PDF format there :
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual
Oddly enough, that site only has 2.62 for Windows 32-bit. I guess I’ll use 2.49 for now, and I’ll keep checking back for updates on Blender 2.63, so when it comes out, I’ll be ready to check for bugs.
Of course, it doesn’t work. I’m going to take some screenshots and file a bug report. This is getting ridiculous.